Combining bitter satire, outrageous parody and uncanny hallucinations

This collection of José Saramago's earliest stories from the beginning of his writing career attests to the novelist's imaginative power and incomparable skill in elaborating the most extravagant fantasies.

Each tale is a wicked, surreal take on life under dictatorship: in Embargo a man drives around a city that is slowly running out of petrol; The Chair recounts what happens when dictator Salazar falls off his chair and dies; in the Kafkaesque Things the life of a civil servant is threatened as objects start to go missing.